


and when i go (don't forget)

by interestobscura



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, also known as Being Gay in Church™ the Fic, faith is hard, i have a lot of feelings about this character okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23356357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interestobscura/pseuds/interestobscura
Summary: Is this desperate collapse (onto your knees, face tilted skyward to the ruined statue) not praise?
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	and when i go (don't forget)

**Author's Note:**

> [listen here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uxT0z-TDEk)

what's the furthest place from here?  
it hasn't been my day  
for a couple years  
what's a couple more?

* * *

_what praise will you have in death?_

* * *

Pain.

It's almost a familiar dance. The devotion, followed by the inevitable fall.

After all, what’s faith without a little suffering? Is it even worth anything if you're not in pain? Is this collapse, onto your knees, face tilted skyward (in penance? in rage? who can say) to the ruined statue, is this not praise? 

Your face, twisted with agony, with fear, ravaged with emotion so strong you feel it leaking out like tears, stands in sharp contrast to the stark absence in the goddess's own. She couldn't even spare you a glance. That power, like so many others, was removed from her, and now she will do the same unto you, the follower. 

Worship looks a lot like this: your blood spilled on the altar of an uncaring god, yet another thing that takes, and takes, and takes, and leaves you nothing but questions in return. Honestly, you should've known better.

Or is this your fault? Do you simply always offer more than you can give? It's in humanity's nature, isn't it, to ask too much and get too much in return. Something once told her: as above, so below. If you care, the universe cares. This is just how they show it. With a knife of bone through your heart.

Your hands come up, almost automatically, to clutch at the smoothsharp cone embedded through your flesh. Feeling out the edges of your prize. It's warm, but not because of it's own nature. Only your blood coating the ivory gives it any semblance of heat. It's a transformation. From cold white to blazing red, she awakens. You yourself are undergoing a similar transformation, if in reverse. If you weren't dying, you might even find this funny. 

Dying. A leap into the darkness. A leap of faith, according to the Helioic school of thought. And yet, and yet. This feels awfully lot like a shove. Is this what you wanted?

Kristen Applebees, what have you done? A cleric with no anchor was always bound to end up here. Alone. Forever seeking. What face will you scratch into the story of your life? 

But this isn't the length and breath of it. Let's put away the mystics for a bit. There was a time when you thought you didn't need faith for answers. The philosophy professors, the students, the graduates. It was fun while it lasted, wasn't it? They, at least, acknowledged in some shape or form the unattainability of it all, the lack of purpose. It's just that you weren't satisfied with that. How could you be? A lifetime spent seeking answers and all you get is a couple old white dudes telling you there wasn't any point to it all? That gods don't matter, that you don't matter, that your friends didn't matter? How could you carry on living believing that was true? 

Here's a fact: faith can heal. You're a cleric, you know this. More than that, you are medically trained. It's in the science of it all: expectation of relief causes your brain to release dopamine, which minimizes the experience of pain. Naturally, negative expectation can similarly cause elevated levels of pain. This is called the nocebo effect. It has a name and everything, and you know names mean more than people ever care to imagine. The fucking bone through your heart is definite proof in itself. Take away a name, and this is what happens. 

But, there you go, digressing again. 

Back to your original point: it's too bad whatever chemical reactions that occur in your mind have no influence on reality. Positivity won't stop an avalanche. Expectation won't halt death. It can, however, make you hurt a little less. Not enough that the pain vanishes, but enough to be noticeable. Enough to create a small void in your mind when you turned your back on Helio and his followers. Enough that when you made doubt the central pillar of your faith, you found yourself unable to draw any relief from it. After all, if you did, then it wouldn't be _doubt_ anymore, would it? It'd be faith. And then you're back to square one. Did you even change at all?

If facts point you to faith but if faith is something you have lost, what then? You can't just shove the doubt back into a tidy box in your mind and return to the life of a faithful servant. You spent too long with it, embracing the questions, cultivating it. God, you were insufferable about it, too. Young and disillusioned and cracking jokes left and right. Look at you now. Prostrate and submissive, about to lay down your life for nothing. For something? If this unnamed goddess is real, then- 

Fuck her. 

You've been on this road before and now that you've come to rely on doubt death comes knocking and _how_ is it fair that you've struggled for so long and so hard and still end up back in this same barren wasteland? Is this truly the way to salvation? And if it is, if the promised land means struggling through 850 years of dirt and dust, are you willing to do it? How can faith heal you if the very mention of it feels like a puncture wound?

God is many things to many people. For you, God is the sound of unraveling. It's the ache that bloomed whenever you were in church and heard the word 'acceptance' take shape in your pastor's mouth and knew, instinctively, that it wasn't for you. Even then, when everything that was truly yours was buried so deep inside, you knew, somehow, it would never apply to you. God is shriveling: the wilted form your body took when you looked at your pastors, your family, all the people that had loved and embraced you in your childhood and saw nothing but disgust reflected back. God is hope: the countless warm memories of Sundays spent at church singing your heart out in a chorus of other young voices, the music swelling, lifting, transcending, until you could almost burst with the joy surrounding you, inside you. God is having someone take your hand and tell you you were special, God is squeezing that hand back and never wanting to let go.

You know that joy you felt, that was real. That disgust in their eyes, that was real too. Love and suffering. Hope and despair. It seems to you that you can never really have one without the other.

Is it a betrayal of yourself, to want God back? To miss the cadence of your mother's prayers, the slant of your father's proud smile as you stumbled on tiny legs towards the altar? It would have been hell to remain, knowing what you know now. The shame would have built up, it would have destroyed you eventually. But right now, in your darkest moment, all you want is to have someone to hold onto. It almost feels like a mistake, leaving church.

Then again, people like you, they don't get much choice in the matter, do they? Even after all the things you've seen, all the impossibilities you've performed, still the burn of someone's gaze on your back as you held Tracker's hand in public almost destroyed you. In a world where you've died twice (three times now), being in love is still the hardest thing you've ever done. 

Oh God, Tracker. You desperately hope she's still alive. Selfishly, you also hope that maybe she's not. Wherever you end up in the afterlife, it's gotta be better with company, right?

If you're even worth an afterlife, that is. This might be something different. It might just be that you'll see nothing at all. Non-existence. You read in the atheism section of your world religions book that this is what the faithless believe would happen after death. Not pain, not pleasure, just nothingness. An absence. Like how it was before you were born. Atoms spiraling out into the universe, never to form the same shape again. After all the shitty versions of the afterlife you've experienced, you're starting to think maybe they had something going there. 

Here's the thing though: it'd be so easy to drop your faith now. A hole through your chest, Fabian's screams ringing somewhere in the back of your head? It would almost too simple to denounce the god before you, to look up in defiance one last time and spit in the face of all those that seek to harm you. Kristen Applebees, going out once more kicking and screaming.

If you do that, you'd be proving her right. And if there's one thing you've learnt about yourself, you've always, always loathed to prove anyone right, least of all some nameless god.

As the life drains out of you, you begin to follow the script. You look up in defiance. You stare the statue right in it's horrific, gouged out face, it's blackened cavity somehow conveying more spite that any full expression would, and you smile. You feel around within yourself and find not terror, not hatred, but kindness. This is a woman who has time and again been forsaken, and has now chosen to do the same to you.

It's a good thing Kristen Applebees is a fucking good cleric, because if anyone can heal an irate, nameless goddess, it damn well better be you. 

* * *

and when i go, don't forget  
the one good thing i almost did  
learned your name without words  
used my eyes, not my hands

**Author's Note:**

> this was directly inspired by the video in total forgiveness (available on dropout for just $4.99!) where ally reads their diary in a bookstore. it's just so sad and sweet and relatable as fuck, because growing up gay in church is _complicated_. 
> 
> sidenote: brennan has killed ally off in all 3 seasons of dimension 20 that they've been on. what on earth did they do to piss him off that much??? (im kidding i love trauma, give me more angst brendad)


End file.
